CASABLANCA, Morocco, June 2, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The annual PR conference of APRA, one of Africa's most important PR organizations, was held in Casablanca, Morocco between May 10-13.

Attracting participants from all around the world, the conference embraced PR measurement and the updated version of Barcelona Principles as its main topics of discussion were in the center of attention of most esteemed media monitoring companies and PR practitioners.

Newsmeter's presentation during the conference

Newsmeter team with other attendees

Seyithan Teymur, Managing Director of Newsmeter's and Deniz Aydoslu Development Manager of Newsmeter, made a presentation on measurement and evaluation, issues being more and more important in terms of the relationship between media monitoring and PR. Another underlined topic within the presentation was applicability and availability of PR measurement tools.

"Advertising Value Equivalent" is dying?

One of the most remarkable parts of the presentation was about Advertising Value Equivalent from Seyithan Teymur: "How you measured this metric was you would take a ruler, measure the height of the space, multiply it by how many columns it was given. Multiply that number by how much that outlet charged you for a "single column centimeters" and voila! You had this magical number that told you how valuable this piece of news was."

Seyithan Teymur kept on telling about press clippings and added: "It was even worse when it came to the so-called advertising value equivalent so yes - no wonder everybody says AVEs are dead."

What About Press Clippings?

Another important point, highlighted by Deniz Aydoslu was about press clippings: "What you did, was find the news about you on newspapers and magazines and other outlets. Find on which page they are, and literally take a ruler and measure their sizes. Now, how can you effectively measure the reach or the impact or the "value" of this story? All the metrics that you have are the "number of subscribers" to this news outlet, and "size" of that piece of news. Now you don't need me telling you how misleading any deduction that you'll make will be."

Conference ended with SABRE Awards Ceremony during which successful PR works in Africa have been awarded. In the eyes of Africa, whole PR world had a great network opportunity and the important developments of PR field were highlighted.

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